Deterioration

“ Finally, progress in medicine, the use of more wholesome food and healthy houses, the diminution of the two most active causes of deterioration, namely, misery and excessive wealth, must prolong the average duration of life, as well as raise the tone of health while it lasts. ”

“ All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once it has taken its place among things. And perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for instance, are not as they were of old ”

“ If we further remember that these people lived in Europe under the unfavorable conditions of a sub-arctic climate, we shall be inclined to agree with Dr. Daniel Wilson, that it is far easier to produce evidences of deterioration than of progress in instituting a comparison between the contemporaries of the mammoth and later prehistoric races of Europe or savage nations of modern times. ”

“ The history of her gradual decline need not be related—the hopes, the suspense, the disappointments—the reviving indications of health, the increasing symptoms of fatal disease—the flush and brilliancy as of exuberant vitality—the fading of all the hues of life—all the vicissitudes of the unrelenting progress of decay—one after another, resolving themselves into the lineaments of death. ”

“ It was an hour when the heart, surrounded by what can live no more and by what never before has lived, grows faint and sick with yearnings for its own past and forlorn with the inevitableness of change—the cruelty of all change. ”

“ If you live, it is as certain as fate that you will come to the second and the third. Your 'eyes will grow dim,' your 'natural force' will be 'abated,' your body will become a burden, your years that are full of buoyancy will be changed for years of heaviness and weariness, strength will decay, 'and the young men'—that is you—'shall utterly fall.'
And the text points also to another fact, that, long before your natural life shall have begun to tend towards decay, hard work and occasional sorrows and responsibilities and burdens of all sorts will very often make you wearied and ready to faint. ”

“ But when the grinders are few, they hinder those from working, and having no antagonists they are not able to work themselves, and so the whole grinding ceaseth, which is a great symptom of the decay of life, at least of a state of weakness.
The next great object which we are called to observe, is, the Decay of Sight—Those that look out of the windows, are darkened. I believe none has ever questioned but this means the eyes, and the infirmities of them in old age. One may be said to look out of a window, when he looks through the glass of the window, or when he looks through the open casement. ”

“ Vast-stomached middle-aged men of all classes, and all crying aloud in fat-lipped silence of indulgence, physical sloth, physical decay before physical prime should have been reached, of mental, moral, and physical decadence from the great Past incredible, and who would one and all, if asked, congratulate themselves on living in these glorious modern times of ’igh civilization and not in the dark, ignorant days of old. ”

“ And finally, though it would be easy to multiply such quotations, the striking account, at the end of the second book, of the growth and the decay of our world is drawn directly from the obvious appearances of the growth and decay of the human body ”

“ You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. ”

“ It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. ”

“ We will not weary our reader with the uneventful story of that recovery: the progress so painfully slow that its steps were imperceptible, and the change which gradually converted the state of fatuity to one of speculation, and finally brought the youth out of sickness and suffering, and made him—weak and delicate, of course—able to feel enjoyment in life and eager for its pleasures. ”

“ Only in vanishing is it a sign of progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat, just as disease is an omen of death, although, for those diseased already, medicine and convalescence may be approaches to health again. ”

“ Such was the mystical explanation of that election of suffering, the raison d’etre of that being who was so harshly separated from her fellows, weighed down by disease, transformed into the pitiable field of every human affliction. ”

“ Can the world have grown worse and I better, or was I blind before and indifferent? If this change is the result of a general decline of physical and intellectual powers—I am ill, you know, and every day I am losing weight—my position is pitiable ”

“ When things get to the worst they must mend, as the old adage goes. Our situation, if the adage is true, must soon be in a better condition. I hope this may be the case! I can not see how we would, or could, be in a worse condition. ”

“ This final rally of powers just when the processes of bodily decay are accelerated, which in times past sometimes took the form of outbreaks of436 prophecy, admonition, or clairvoyance as to the meaning of present tendencies for the far future of the race and the further development of which is one of the great present hopes of a world in which the processes of degeneration are now being greatly accelerated, can be nothing else than the birth throes of a new and higher stage in the evolution of man. ”

“ It seems to promise that there shall be yet a change in the dreary lot; it whispers that trouble may not last: that sickness may be superseded by health; that this dark wintry world will be followed by heaven. ”

“ The moment one ceases to do its work, or appropriates more than its share of the juices elaborated, or more than it needs to fit it for the performance of its appointed use, that moment comes disease—disease to itself and disease to all the rest. ”

“ Poverty, care, anger, coldness, and indifference, the rage of passion, the obstinate retention of narrow purposes, indications of change and division in the spiritual world, entire dependence on that of Nature—in one word all that is implied in the transitory condition of human life—leaves its indelible, if quite incalculable, expression on the varied surface of the faces of mankind. ”

“ Chronic Decline, with its attendant anæmia, may be induced by bad habits, destitution, or constitutional depravity. Sickly forms, wrecks of health, address our senses on every side. All these subjects evidently once had a capital in life, sufficient, if properly and carefully husbanded, to comfortably afford them vital stamina and length of days. ”

“ Comfort and discomfort of our four limbs are still with us, as of old. The miseries and pleasures of this life are still with us, as of old. The changes of good government and rebellion are still with us, as of old. And since these things are actually heard and seen and do alternate, even a hundred years seem too many; how much more miserable would be a still further prolongation of life? ”

“ Finally, it is the general aim of these addresses to bring courage and hope to the suffering, to proclaim joy in the midst of deep sorrow, to lead us gently and softly through the hour of deep affliction. This age is to me as a shade that stands weeping over its own corpse, from which it has been driven forth by a host of diseases, unable to tear its gaze from the form so beloved of old, and trying in despair every means to enter again the home of pestilence. ”

“ Interpretation.—When straight and not dissected by obscure little lines, denotes a healthy body; if extending only to the hollow of the hand, or short, it denotes a short life, or full of disease; the longer this line, the longer may the life be; if cut at end poverty in old age. ”

“ That every kind of decline and tendency to sickness has incessantly been at work in helping to create general evaluations: that in those valuations which now dominate, decadence has even begun to preponderate, that we have not only to combat the conditions which present misery and degeneration have brought into being; but that all decadence, previous to that of our own times, has been transmitted and has therefore remained an active force amongst us. ”

“ It should be a crisis and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting into the new. ”

“ For thousands of years this process has been going on, and through years unnumbered it will be continued. In your world there is a gradual decay; nature there is exhausting herself. For the present you have enough and to spare ”

“ History notes the wrong; but the patient suffering, the heroic endeavour, that, slowly and silently, as the soft processes of Nature re-clothing with verdure the passion-wasted land, obliterate that wrong, she has no eyes for. ”

“ To those among us, however, who have lived long enough to form some just estimate of the rate of the changes which are, hour by hour in accelerating catastrophe, manifesting themselves in the laws, the arts, and the creeds of men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never at any former time, the thoughts of the true nature of our life, and of its powers and responsibilities, should present themselves with absolute sadness and sternness. ”

“ Here youth is ugly with loathsome diseases and the deformities which follow physical degeneracy. Here the decrepitude of old age is found at thirty. The poor themselves have a very expressive term for the slow process of decay which they suffer, viz.: “Tenant-house Rot.” ”

“ Thus, in the ordinary affairs of life, difficulties which threaten to impede our progress when viewed in long perspective, and from which the faint-hearted turn back in despair, when fairly encountered and grappled with, may often be overcome with half the labour and pain we contemplated. ”

“ Progress is hastened through intense tribulations.
Great changes and advances of either a material, mental, political, social, or spiritual world are, like births, generally outwrought through anguish and sufferings. ”

“ Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old age ”

“ You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,—the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;—and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;—yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. ”

“ In other words, degeneration, losing of meaning and purpose, or death, may belong to the conditions of actual progress—something that ever appears in the form of a will and way to greater power and is accomplished at the expense of numberless lesser powers. ”

“ If this notion be accepted, then is the idea of degeneration as a normal phase of life rendered still more feasible and plain. Reaching to the individual and to the species as well; extending and including in its scope the lowly organized as well as the higher being; affecting one group or class lightly, and influencing another wellnigh to the complete exclusion of progress, we find degeneration and retrogression to be numbered among the stern realities of existence. ”

“ Here is where the sufferer must exert his will power, change completely his mental and physical habits and his surroundings. Occupation, changed habits, taking in of confidence, faith and courage thoughts—these changes are necessary to the victim of melancholia, or he will shatter on the danger rocks and go to pieces. ”

“ For at a time when things Were being taxed by maladies so great, And so great perils, if some cause more fell Had then assailed them, far and wide they would Have gone to disaster and supreme collapse. ”

“ Thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in the earth. ”

“ But some cry, ‘Ay, but this habit of disregarding misfortunes blunts your wills when you have the power to relieve them.’ Relieve! was ever such delusion? What can we relieve in the vast mass of human misfortunes? As well might we take a drop from the ocean, and cry, ‘Ha, ha! we have lessened the sea!’ What are even your public charities? what your best institutions? How few of the multitude are relieved at all; how few of that few relieved permanently! Men die, suffer, starve just as soon, and just as numerously ”

“ There are both the joy of the abundant life, the craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and monotony which prepare the mind [34] for culmination in dramatic events. There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the individual and the social life. ”

“ Gone was the old tranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A new race, struggling amid terrible hardships, fought bravely and bitterly for the preservation of an existence they had formerly despised. Man found his life filled with toil, sweetened by peril, checked by manifold disasters, and was deluded into cherishing at any cost that which was so painful to sustain. ”

“ Long suffering, through years of unmitigated tribulation, had already introduced disease into her delicate frame; and increased persecution gave it strength and root. As it continued to press upon her, she gradually grew feebler and more feeble ”